Cultured Magazine — “Making History"
For their fall issue, Cultured traces Studio Gang’s trajectory of re-use work, culminating in the upcoming Kresge College Renewal at the University of California Santa Cruz, shown here for the first time.
‘With San Francisco-based associate TEF Design, Studio Gang is designing five new buildings—a 36,000-square-foot academic building, three new residential buildings and a town hall—and working on an overall renewal of Kresge College, all to be completed by 2023 (the first phase is the academic building, on track for a 2021 finish). The site, which has a forty-foot change in elevation from one end to the other, is a forest grown on top of a marine terrace and incorporates a nature reserve that the school’s ecology students use in their studies. Mapping redwood families and preserving as much of the existing landscape as possible was key and so was reuse, an architectural strategy that Gang has long championed. . . . At UCSC’s Kresge College, both the spirit and structure of postmodernism remain in Gang’s transformation. With sensitivity, community engagement and intelligent planning, even the most stark preservationists should be satisfied.
“Charles Moore and William Turnbull Jr.’s Kresge College is a masterpiece of American architecture, but that places change, adapt and grow is a reality we all face,” says Kevin Keim, director of the Charles Moore Foundation. “What I hope is that the changes intensify Kresge’s already wonderful sense of place and add to what Charles and Bill made with such gusto. Most of all, I hope that Kresge continues to be a place for people.”’
An axonometric diagram of Kresge College, highlighting the pedestrian street that was a cornerstone of MLTW’s design, now made more accessible and expanded to create a continuous loop with the new structures.
